I am writing to you because Bill Moyers is right: A serious media crisis threatens our democracy. The conservative media message machine dominates our public discourse, undermining humanistic values and, as studies have shown, making people ignorant with propaganda masquerading as news.

It's time progressives have a media system that can compete with the right, and tell the truth. We hope you will help AlterNet fight back.

Conservative media works together seamlessly to ensure that conservative messages are read, heard, and seen every day, repeatedly, by both core conservatives and the 60 million people who voted conservative in 2004.

Without the conservative media machine, George Bush would probably have lost the last election. Without a more effective progressive media machine, conservatives will probably go on winning.

In contrast to the conservatives who have invested hundreds of millions of dollars over the past 30 years, progressives have failed to sufficiently invest in an independent media structure. It's time to change this pattern and invest much more in media of our own. This crisis requires new thinking and action.

"Echo" - The Next Wave in Media

AlterNet is working with independent media partners to help create an alternative -- a powerful progressive media "echo chamber" to challenge and overcome conservative dominance in the marketplace of ideas. This is a big job, and we need your help.

"Echoing" means collaborating to increase the reach and impact of facts and ideas that support progressive ideals and goals and undermine conservative claims. Echoing means repeating messages that communicate our values and our vision in as many places and as many ways possible.

Imagine the clear framing of a progressive vision or a hard-hitting investigative article shown on cable, satellite, and pay per view; downloaded to your TiVo; distributed on DVD; streamed on the internet; broadcast on the radio; and printed in magazines and webzines, all at the same time.

Five years ago it wouldn't have been possible to tackle the big media machine. Today, the technology revolution makes it far easier to produce quality media faster and cheaper. Meanwhile, the Air America radio network is growing and Link TV, Democracy Now and the powerful array of progressive bloggers and web sites are all finding new audiences and increasingly working together.

We Need Your Support

AlterNet will continue to provide the high quality journalism, sharp opinions, and smart analysis that you expect. But that isn't enough if we are to win in the future. We hope you agree.

AlterNet, through our Echo Chamber Project, is working to bring together the smartest tech minds in the progressive sector to help chart the new technology landscape. Our aim is for progressive media to reach more people in more different ways -- even on their cell phones and handhelds.

Can you help support our immediate projects?

PEEK - a blog on the blogs, so people can go to their computers in the morning and know what the blogosphere is saying.
The first true online Progressive Media Guide, a daily catalog of all the significant media events that national progressive audiences can access via streaming, television, video, or DVD.
Publishing our new book, Start Making Sense: Turning the Lessons of Election 2004 into Progressive Victories in April. We'll go on the road with the book for readings and debates working to broadcast the dialogues the book generates on TV and the internet.

We need your support to accomplish these goals and more. We can no longer be victims of the right-wing media machine.

Please donate today to help AlterNet become an important hub in a new, powerful, and growing progressive media echo chamber.

As the war in Iraq continues to attract mass attention there is another war breaking out back here in America. Not many are well informed about the information war that is in full swing between citizens and the corporate media cartels. Most consider it as just between the "internet" and "mass media", it's not. It is people against tyranny. I really hope the people win.

They Spoke The Truth
About The Lapdog Media...
From Walter Burien
2-25-5

"In March, 1915, the J.P. Morgan interests, the steel, shipbuilding, and powder interests, and their subsidiary organizations, got together 12 men high up in the newspaper world (think this might have carried through to other forms as communications expanded, such as TV etc? Hmmmm, could be ) and employed them to select the most influential newspapers in the United States and sufficient number of them to control generally the policy of the daily press of the United States.

These 12 men worked the problem ( Problem? What problem? Whose got a problem? JP Morgan and "interests"? Hmmmm ) out by selecting 179 newspapers, and then began, by an elimination process, to retain only those necessary for the purpose of controlling the general policy of the daily press throughout the country. They found it was only necessary to purchase the control of 25 of the greatest papers. The 25 papers were agreed upon; emissaries were sent to purchase the policy, national and international, of these papers; an agreement was reached; the policy of the papers was bought, to be paid for by the month; an editor was furnished for each paper to properly supervise and edit information regarding the questions of preparedness, militarism, financial policies, and other things of national and international nature considered vital to the interest of the ( ...citizens? Nope! The US? No, not even our country BUT the ) PURCHASERS. ( emphasis mine. Well, all for freedom of the press. Wonder why the founders thought that was so important anyway. But who cares about those guys, they are just a bunch of outdated old fogies anyway, right? )

This contract is in existence at the present time, and it accounts for the news columns of the daily press of the country."

--Congressional Record of 1917, page 2949.

"There is no such thing, at this date of the world's history in America, as an independent press You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dare to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinion out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the street looking for another job. If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my' paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone. The business of the journalist is to destroy the truth; to lie outright; to pervert; to vilify; to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it and what folly is this toasting an independent press? We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities, and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes."

--John Swinton, former chief of staff, The New York Times, in a 1953 speech before the New York Press Club

"We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promise of discretion for almost forty years... It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto determination practiced in past centuries."

-- David Rockefeller, in an address given to Catherine Graham, publisher of The Washington Post and other media luminaries in attendance in Baden Baden, Germany at the June 1991 annual meeting of the world elite Bilderberg Group.

"We are going to impose our agenda on the coverage by dealing with issues and subjects that we choose to deal with."

-- Richard M. Cohen, former Senior Producer of CBS political news

"Our job is to give people not what they want, but what we decide they ought to have."

-- Richard Salant, former President of CBS News

About The New World Order...

"The individual is handicapped by coming face to face with a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists."

-- J. Edgar Hoover, former head of the FBI

"Every child in American who enters school with an allegiance toward our elected officials, toward our founding fathers, toward our institutions, toward the preservation of this form of government. all of this proves the children are sick, because the truly well individual is one who has rejected all of those things and is what I would call the true international child of the future."

-- Chester M. Pierce, Harvard University psychiatrist, at a 1973 International Education Seminar, as quoted in "Educating For The New World Order" by B.K. Eakman

"The CFR [Council On Foreign Relations, New York City] is the American Branch of a society which originated in England and believes national directives should be obliterated and one-world rule established. I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years, and was permitted in the early 1960's to examine its papers and secret records... I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known."

--Dr. Carroll Quigley, Professor of International Relations, Georgetown University Foreign Service School, Washington, D.C., author of the epic "Tragedy & Hope", advocate of one-world government and personal mentor of President William Clinton (who acknowledged Professor Quigley during his 1992 presidential inauguration speech)

"We shall have world government whether or not we like it. The only question is whether World government will be achieved by conquest or consent."

--James Paul Warburg, Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, 1921 - 1932, before the U.S. Senate, February 17, 1950

"To achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men, their individualism, loyalty to family traditions, national patriotism and religious dogmas."

-- Brock Chisolm, former Director of the World Health Organization

"The main purpose of the Council on Foreign Relations is promoting the disarmament of US. sovereignty and national independence and submergence into an all powerful, one world government".

-- Chester Ward, Rear Admiral and former Navy Judge Advocate 1956 - 1960 and CFR member for 15 years

<http://www.taxtruth4u.com/cfr.htm>Who's Who in the CFR?! <http://www.taxtruth4u.com/cfr.htm>Click here!

"The real rulers in Washington are invisible and exercise power from behind the scenes."

-- Felix Frankfurter, United States Supreme Court Justice

"We operate here under directives from the White House.. [to] use our grant making power to alter life in the US. so that we can comfortably be merged with the Soviet Union."

-- Rowan Gaither, former president of the Ford Foundation, in a 1954 statement to Norman Dodd regarding Congressional investigations of the un-American activities of tax-exempt foundations operating in the U.S.

"Gentlemen, Comrades, do not be concerned about all you hear about glasnost and perestroika and democracy in the coming years These are primarily for outward consumption. There will be no significant internal change within the Soviet Union, other than for cosmetic purposes. Our purpose is to disarm the Americans and let them fall asleep."

-- Mikhial Gorbachev, former President of the Soviet Union, to the Politburo in November of 1987

"In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, it was planned that way."

-- Franklin D. Roosevelt

"I believe that if the people of this nation fully understood what Congress has done to them over past forty-nine years, they would move on Washington. It adds up to a preconceived plan to destroy the economic and social independence of the United States."

-- Senator George Malone of Nevada, speaking before Congress in 1957

"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."

-- Abraham Lincoln

"The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism. But, under the name of "liberalism", they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program, until one day America will be a socialist nation, without knowing how it happened."

-- Norman Thomas, for many years the U.S. Socialist Party presidential candidate

"America is like a healthy body and its resistance is threefold: its patriotism, its morality and its spiritual life. If we can undermine these three areas, America will collapse from within."

-- Joseph Stalin, former dictator of the Soviet Union

About a Republic vs. a Democracy...

"I pledge allegiance to the flag, and to the Republic for which it stands..."

-- United States Pledge of Allegiance

"Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths."

-- James Madison

"Democracy is a form of government that cannot long survive, for as soon as the people learn that they have a voice in the fiscal policies of the government, they will move to vote for themselves all the money in the treasury, and bankrupt the nation."

-- Karl Marx, 1848 author of "The Communist Manifesto"

"Liberty has never lasted long in a democracy, nor has it ever ended in anything better than despotism."

-- Fisher Ames (1758 - 1808)

About Citizens, Politicians And Government...

"If ever time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in Government, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin."

--Samuel Adams

"It is not the function of our government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error."

"Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself."

-- Louis D. Brandeis, former Supreme Court Justice

"It is inherent in government's right, if necessary, to lie... that seems to me basic - basic."

-- Arthur Sylvester, former Assistant Secretary of Defense

About liberty, Slavery, Truth, Rights And Courage...

"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free."

--Johann W. Von Goethe

"Fear can only prevail when victims are ignorant of the facts."

-- Thomas Jefferson

"He who knows nothing is nearer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors."

"In the beginning of a change, the patriot is a scarce man; brave, hated, and scorned. When his cause succeeds, however, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot."

--Samuel Clemens...author Mark Twain

"The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedients, and by parts... the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing."

-- Edmund Burke

"The right to freedom being the gift of God, it is not in the power of man to alienate this gift and voluntarily become a slave."

-- Samuel Adams

"Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day. But a series of oppressions, pursued unalterably through every change of ministers, too plainly proves a deliberate systematic plan of reducing us to slavery."

-- Thomas Jefferson

"I have never seen more Senators express discontent with their jobs ... we have been accomplices to doing something terrible and unforgivable to this wonderful country... we have given our children a legacy of bankruptcy. We have defrauded our country to get ourselves elected."

-- John Danforth, Republican Senator from Missouri, in an interview in The Arizona Republic on April 22, 1992

"You have rights antecedent to all earthly governments; rights that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws; rights derived from the Great Legislator of the Universe."

-- John Adams

"To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men."

-- Abraham Lincoln

"Any truth is better than make-believe... rather than love, than money than fame, give me truth."

-- Henry David Thoreau

'Most people, sometime in their lives, stumble across truth. Most jump up, brush themselves off, and hurry on about their business as if nothing had happened."

-- Winston Churchill

"I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of society but the people themselves, and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion."

-- Thomas Jefferson

"The war against illegal plunder has been fought since the beginning of the world. But how is... legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime. Then abolish this law without delay ....... If such a law is not abolished immediately it will spread, multiply and develop into a system."